Friends in High Places - [Commissario Brunetti 09]

by Donna Leon

  Neither of them thought it necessary to comment on this or to add, ‘Like Rossi.’

  Rizzardi got to his feet, slipped off the gloves, and put them in the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘When can you do it?’ was all Brunetti could think of to say.

  ‘This afternoon, I think.’ Rizzardi knew better than to ask Brunetti if he wanted to attend. ‘If you call me after five, I should know something.’ Before Brunetti could respond, Rizzardi added, ‘But it won’t be much, not much more than what we see here.’

  After Rizzardi had left, the crime team began their deadly parody of domesticity: sweeping, dusting, picking up small things that had fallen to the floor and seeing that they were put in safe places. Brunetti forced himself to go through the pockets of the young people, first the discarded clothing that lay beside and atop the mattresses, then, after he’d accepted a pair of lab gloves from Del Vecchio, the clothing that they still wore. In the breast pocket of Zecchino’s shirt, he found three more plastic envelopes, each containing white powder. He passed them to Del Vecchio, who carefully labelled them and placed them inside his evidence kit.

  Rizzardi, he was glad to see, had closed their eyes. Zecchino’s naked legs reminded him of the legs he’d seen in photos of those stick figures standing at the front gates of concentration camps: there was only skin and sinew, little sign of muscle. And how knobby his knees were. One pelvic bone was exposed, cutting sharp. Red pustules covered both of his thighs, though Brunetti couldn’t tell if they were suppurating scars from old injections or symptoms of skin disease. The girl, though alarmingly thin and almost breast-less, was not as cadaverous as Zecchino. At the realization that both were now, and for ever, cadaverous, Brunetti turned away from them and went downstairs.

  Because he was in charge of this part of the investigation, the least he could do for the dead was remain until the bodies had been removed and the lab teams were satisfied that they had found, sampled, and examined everything that might be of future use to the police in finding the killers. He walked to the end of the calle and looked across at the garden on the other side, glad that forsythia always succeeded in looking so happy, however hastily dressed.

  They would have to ask, of course, canvass the area and see who could remember seeing anyone going into the calle or into the building. When he turned around, he saw that a small group of people had already gathered at the other end of the calle, where it opened out on a larger street, and he started towards them, the first questions already forming in his mind.

  As he expected, no one had seen anything, neither that day nor at any time in the last few weeks. No one had any idea that it was possible to get into the building. No one had ever seen Zecchino, nor could they remember ever having seen a girl. Since there was no way to force them to speak, Brunetti didn’t make the effort to disbelieve them, but he knew from long experience that, when dealing with the police, few Italians could remember much beyond their own names.

  The other questioning could wait until after lunch or the evening, when the people in the buildings in the area could be expected to be at home. But no one, he knew, would admit having seen anything. The word would quickly spread that two drug addicts had died in the building, and it would be the rare person who would see their deaths as anything special, certainly not as something worth the trouble of being questioned by the police. Why put up with endless hours of being treated as a suspect? Why run the risk of having to take the time off from work to be asked further questions or to attend a trial?

  He knew the police were not viewed with anything even approaching sympathy by the general public; he knew how badly the police treated them, no matter how they fell into the orbit of an investigation, either as suspect or witness. For years he had tried to train the men under him to treat witnesses as people who were willing to be of help, as, in a sense, colleagues, only to walk past questioning rooms where they were being hectored, threatened, verbally abused. No wonder people fled in fear from the very idea of providing information to the police: he’d do the same.

  The thought of lunch was intolerable: so was the idea of taking the memory of what he had just seen into the company of his family. He called Paola then went back to the Questura and sat there, doing whatever he could to dull his mind with routine, waiting for Rizzardi to call. It would not be news, the cause of their deaths, but it would at least be information, and he could put that in a file and perhaps take comfort from having imposed this small bit of order upon the chaos of sudden death.

  For the next four hours, he sorted through two months’ backlog of papers and reports, neatly writing his initials at the bottom of folders he’d examined without understanding. It took him all afternoon, but he cleared his desk of papers, even went so far as to take them down to Signorina Elettra’s office and, in her absence, leave her a note, asking that she see to their filing or consignment to whoever was due to read them next.

  When this was done, he went down to the bar at the bridge and had a glass of mineral water and a toasted cheese sandwich. He picked up that day’s Gazzettino from the counter and saw, in the second section, the article he had planted. As he expected, it said far more than he had, suggesting that arrest was imminent, conviction inescapable, and the drug trade in the Veneto effectively destroyed. He dropped the paper and went back to the Questura, noticing on the way that the sparse yellow tops of forsythia were pushing their way over the top of the wall on the other side of the canal.

  At his desk, he checked his watch and saw that it was late enough to call Rizzardi. He was just reaching for the phone when it rang.

  ‘Guido,’ the pathologist began with no introduction, ‘when you looked at those kids this morning, after I left, did you remember to wear gloves?’

  It took a moment for Brunetti to overcome his surprise, and he had to think for a moment before he remembered. ‘Yes. Del Vecchio gave me a pair.’

  Rizzardi asked a second question. ‘Did you see her teeth?’

  Again, Brunetti had to put himself back in the room. ‘I noticed only that it looked as if they were all there, not like with most drug addicts. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘There was blood on her teeth and in her mouth,’ Rizzardi explained.

  The words took Brunetti back to that squalid room and the two figures draped across one another. ‘I know. It was all over her face.’

  ‘That was her blood,’ Rizzardi said, putting heavy emphasis on the pronoun. Before Brunetti could question him, he went on, ‘The blood in her mouth was someone else’s.’

  ‘Zecchino’s?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, my God, she bit him,’ Brunetti said, and then asked, ‘Did you get enough to...’ and stopped, uncertain about just what it was Rizzardi would be able to get. He’d read endless reports about DNA matching and blood and semen samples that could be used as evidence, but he lacked both the scientific knowledge to understand how it all worked as well as the intellectual curiosity to care about anything other than the fact that it could be done and that positive identifications could be made from the results.

  ‘Yes,’ Rizzardi answered. ‘If you can find me the person, I have enough to match him to the blood in her mouth.’ Rizzardi paused and Brunetti could tell from the tension on the line that he had much more to say.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘They were positive.’

  What did he mean? The results of his tests? The samples? ‘I don’t understand,’ Brunetti admitted.

  ‘Both of them, the boy and the girl. They were positive.’

  ‘Dio mio!’ Brunetti exclaimed, understanding at last.

  ‘It’s the first thing we check with addicts. He was much farther along than she was; the virus had really taken hold. He was already far gone, couldn’t have lived another three months. Didn’t you notice?’

  Yes, Brunetti had noticed, but he hadn’t understood, or perhaps he had been unwilling to look too closely or to understand what he saw. He had paid no real attention to h
ow thin Zecchino was or to what that might mean.

  Instead of answering Rizzardi’s question, Brunetti asked, ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘She wasn’t as bad; the infection wasn’t as far advanced. That’s probably why she was strong enough to try to fight them off.’

  ‘But what about these new medicines? Why weren’t they taking any?’ Brunetti demanded, as if he thought Rizzardi would have an answer.

  ‘I don’t know why they weren’t, Guido,’ Rizzardi said patiently, remembering that he was speaking to a man with children little younger than the two victims. ‘But I saw no sign in their blood, or anywhere inside them, that either one of them was taking anything. Drug addicts usually don’t.’

  Neither of them chose to say anything further about that. Instead, Brunetti asked, ‘What about the bite? Tell me.’

  ‘There was a lot of flesh caught between her teeth, so whoever it was she bit has a nasty wound.’

  ‘Is it contagious like that?’ Brunetti asked, amazed that, after years of information and talk and articles in the papers and magazines, he had no clear idea.

  ‘Theoretically, yes,’ Rizzardi answered. ‘There are cases in the literature where it seems to have been spread that way, though I’ve never had first-hand knowledge of it. I suppose it could happen that way. But the disease isn’t like it was years ago: the new medicines control it pretty well, especially if they start taking them in the early stages.’

  Brunetti listened, wondering about the possible consequences of ignorance like his own. If he, a man who read widely and had a reasonably broad knowledge of what was happening in the world, had no idea of how contagious a bite could be and still had a sort of primitive, atavistic horror that the disease could be passed on in this manner, then it would not surprise him in the least if the fear were widespread.

  He pulled his attention back to Rizzardi. ‘But how bad is the bite?’

  ‘I’d say he’s got a chunk missing from his arm.’ And before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘There were hairs in her mouth. Probably from the forearm.’

  ‘How big was it?’

  After a moment’s thought Rizzardi said, ‘About the size of a dog’s bite, perhaps a cocker spaniel.’ Neither of them commented on the bizarre comparison.

  ‘Enough to go to a doctor about?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. If it becomes infected, then yes.’

  ‘Or if they knew she was positive,’ Brunetti continued. ‘Or came to realize it after.’ Anyone aware that he’d been bitten by an infected person would flee, terrified, to anyone who could tell him whether the disease had been passed on to him, Brunetti was sure. He considered the consequences: doctors would have to be called, hospital emergency rooms notified, contact made even with pharmacies where the killer might go in search of antiseptics or dressings.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘He would have been dead before the end of the summer. She might have lasted another year, but not much longer.’ Rizzardi stopped for a moment and then added, in an entirely different voice, ‘Do you think they leave scars on us, Guido, the things we have to say or do?’

  ‘Sweet Jesus, I hope not,’ Brunetti answered in a soft voice, said he’d be in touch with Rizzardi when he had an identification of the girl, and hung up.

  * * * *

  22

  He called down to the officers’ squad room and told them to be alert for any new reports of a girl gone missing, about seventeen, and to start checking back through the records to see if any had been reported in the last few weeks. Even as he spoke to them, however, he knew it was entirely possible that no one would report her: many kids had become disposable, their parents not at all concerned at prolonged absences. He wasn’t sure about her age, but seventeen would be his guess. He hoped she wasn’t any younger. If she was, Rizzardi would probably know, but he didn’t want to.

  He went down to the men’s room and washed his hands, dried them, and washed them again. Back at his desk, he took a piece of paper from his drawer and wrote in bold capital letters the headline he wanted to see in tomorrow’s papers: ‘Killer’s Victim Takes Vengeance With Fatal Bite’. He looked down at it, wondering, like Rizzardi, what sort of scars these things would leave on him, drew an insert mark between ‘Vengeance’ and ‘With’ and added, ‘From Beyond the Grave’ on the line above. He studied this for a moment but decided the additional phrase made the line too long to fit in one column and so crossed it out. He pulled out the dog-eared notebook in which he kept names and phone numbers and again dialled the office number of the crime reporter of Il Gazzettino. His friend, flattered that Brunetti had liked the other story, agreed to see that this one got into next morning’s edition. He said he loved Brunetti’s headline and would make sure it appeared as written.

  ‘I don’t want you to get in any trouble,’ Brunetti said in response to the man’s eager compliance. ‘There’s no risk, is there, if you print it?’

  The man laughed outright. ‘Trouble for printing something that’s not true? Me?’ Still laughing, he started to say goodbye, when Brunetti stopped him.

  ‘Is there any way you could get this into La Nuova, as well?’ he asked. ‘I want it in both papers.’

  ‘Probably. There’s someone over there who’s been hacking into our computer for years. It saves them the cost of a reporter. So I’ll just type this in, and they’ll use it, especially if I make it sound really lurid. They can’t resist blood. But they won’t use your headline, I’m afraid,’ he said with real regret. ‘They always change them, at least one word.’

  Content with what he had got, Brunetti resigned himself to this, thanked his friend, and hung up.

  In order to give himself something to do, or perhaps just to keep himself moving and away from his desk, he walked downstairs to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her, head bent over a magazine.

  She looked up at the sound of his footsteps, ‘Ah, you’re back, Commissario,’ she said, beginning to smile. When she saw the expression he brought into the office with him, her smile dissolved. She closed the magazine, opened a drawer, and pulled a folder from it. Leaning forward, she passed it up to him. ‘I heard about the two young people,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He didn’t know if he was meant to thank her for her condolences or not. Instead, he nodded as he accepted the folder, then pulled open the cover. ‘The Volpatos?’ he asked.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she answered. ‘You’ll see from what’s in there that they’ve got to be very well protected.’

  ‘By whom?’ he asked, glancing down at the first page.

  ‘Someone in the Guardia di Finanza, I’d say.’

  ‘Why?’

  She stood and leaned over her desk. ‘On the second page,’ she prompted. When he turned to it, she pointed to a row of numbers. ‘The first number’s the year. Then comes the total of their declared wealth: bank accounts, apartments, stocks. And the third column is what they declared as income for those same years.’

  ‘So,’ he said, commenting on the obvious, ‘each subsequent year, they should earn more, as they certainly own more.’ That much was evident from the expanding list of properties.

  He continued to study the lists. Instead of growing larger each year, the third number decreased, even though the Volpatos acquired more apartments, businesses, and houses. Relentlessly, they continued to acquire more and pay less.

  ‘Have they ever been audited by the Finanza?’ he asked, holding in his hands a fiscal red flag so large and incarnadine as to be easily visible as far away as the central offices of the Guardia di Finanza in Rome.

  ‘Never,’ she said, shaking her head and sitting back down. ‘That’s why I say they’ve got to be protected by someone.’

  ‘Did you get copies of their tax returns?’

  ‘Of course,’ she answered simply, making no attempt to disguise her pride. ‘Those numbers for what they earn every year are repeated on all of them, but they manage to prove that th
ey’ve spent a fortune on capital improvements to their properties, year after year, and they seem incapable of selling a single piece of property at a profit.’

  ‘Who do they sell them to?’ Brunetti asked, though years of similar experiences had made him familiar with this particular script.

  ‘So far, among other sales, they’ve sold two apartments to city councillors and two to officers of the Guardia di Finanza. Always at a loss, especially the one that got sold to the colonel.

  ‘And,’ she continued, flipping over a page and pointing to the top line, ‘it seems they’ve also sold two apartments to a Dottor Fabrizio dal Carlo.’